PEOPLE (forerunner of the Ecology Party, and now the present-day Green Party) was founded by (ex)Conservative politicians over fifty years ago, so nothing much changes. The current Green Party dogmatic obsession with “transubstantiation” (in its modern, intersectional context…) is presumably not popular in rural Suffolk? Focusing on medicalised gender reassignment is one way of lowering population levels by sterilisation, I suppose.
Jim Veenbaas
4 months ago
They sound like typical green voters – those with enough time and money to adopt fashionable luxury beliefs. They don’t want solar, wind or nuclear – and I assume coal would be even less attractive. In 2024, there is no excuse for not understanding the profound dangers of net zero.
Exactly. They are the posh Wellie wing of our vast narcisstic Property Rich (a class notable in history for having not secured wealth by any merit). All have benefited from the Property Heist since the 90s (rigged Remainiac formula = build no new houses/keep interest rates at zero/stoke demand with mass migration). Bingo! Let them put up their BLM posters and trill and cluck about Greta and Climate change. They are utter idiots drunk on their pompous sense of moral virtue. They avow Neo Pol Potism. They are too scared of seeming raycist to argue against the greatest single force destroying their precious green environment in the UK- the uncontrolled unplanned mass influx of 12 million people. Incredible. I hope these ghastly Greens get eaten by their rewilded wolves and lost in the forest of weeds they prefer to the preservation of our land for the supply of homegrown food.
I agree with you and share your anger. My father thought the same 50 years ago. There are no words good enough to describe the difference between these green slugs and the rest of us fighting for an existence in other parts of the UK.
But, as my father knew, they have contacts, they know people and they have power. This is one of the main reasons why we should never, ever rejoin the EU. The EU is not a democratic organisation and having power, knowing people, being able to influence decisions, etc, will fit nicely into the EU organisation.
You are right to suspect that there may be a push from Starmer to cosy up to the EU again. Independence scares Labour and frankly their blind faith in the EU – along with the equality mania and mad eco Millibandism – represent the only credos in their manky stinky ideas locker. But I think the EU will be a very different beast in 5 years. The crises in their no Russian gas economy & mass immigration/ multiculturalism will have turned Western Europe – maybe even France – Eurosceptic. The far greater danger lies here. Our ruling permanent Progressive New Order and Blob are hardcore diehard Remainiacs. The sickness of the EU credo of governance – a cancerous failing system of top down diktat, suffocating regulation and Blob bureaucracy and contempt for a electoral mandate (er – us) lives on in them, the lawyers, the evangelical BBC, woke academia and the wfh broken public sector. No vote can remove our dodgy immigration judges, the secret EHCR judges abroad, the ‘bullied’ Brex assassinating (lockdown partying) Civil Servants, the Leninist immoral Young Doctors, the useless Bank of England & NHS leaders. We are an EU Legacy Party State. Our problem lies here, not there.
I agree with you here entirely. What I do not believe, however, is that ALL the Greens in Suffock are Nimbys. There is a sensible case to be made for better quality food and food security, but both parties ignore it, because food would cost more – and quickly affect the amount spent on a roof over our heads, which BOTH parties want to avoid. In short the Labour party is just as complicit.
Whereas the typical tory voters are those with enough time and money to adopt unfashionable luxury beliefs!
Billy Bob
4 months ago
So it’s just a bunch of older wealthy NIMBYs doing everything they can to block much needed infrastructure and housing for the following generations?
Never mind that they largely got a start in life thanks to the government building entire new towns and houses across the country, they’ll do everything in their power to ensure the youngsters today don’t have the same chance at getting ahead that they did
Don’t forget that they squirrelled away all that old industry into their pension portfolios in the privatisation revolution and have retired early off the proceeds (with a little help from QE).
Tell Sid – he could miss a once in a lifetime chance to be a rentseeker.
Simon Boudewijn
4 months ago
You can hear them if asked what the economic future will be like under Green’s:
”Yes, Yes, of course all this green developement and ESG, and Nimbyism will stop anyone who is not already set in life from ever getting there – but what is the problem with that? I cannot see the point of your comment.”
Simon Neale
4 months ago
I’m sure they’re in favour of allotments, electric car charging points, locally produced meat, and maybe a nice crop of wind turbines on their land. Oh, and the feelings of moral superiority that come with luxury beliefs, of course.
Expect a change of heart when they realise the blokes who fix and deliver their stuff can’t afford to run their white vans, and an African shanty town appears on the village green.
Love that argument. First half is semi-decent though wouldn’t the owners of white vans prefer to serve “luxury” customers with the means to cover the cost and living close by? Then couldn’t think of anything else so reeled out a lazy right wing scaremonger.
Tyler Durden
4 months ago
I think we can say that climate change has now fully replaced socialism as the West’s secular religion. Climate change, gender liberation and racial justice as one post-Marxist complex.
Talking of which, people with resources, often inherited, still have their white man’s burden and even if they are conservative they can embrace local green concerns rather than the desertification or flooding of poor countries.
Douglas Redmayne
4 months ago
Good. This in another part of the destruction of the Tory party which will get its head stamped on later this year.
Robbie K
4 months ago
who are swinging from Right to Left
This is nothing to do with right and left and it’s disappointing that the author hasn’t grasped that despite his grand tour.
Neither is it about wealthy landowners or ‘luxury beliefs’, conservative voters in this area are typical working class people who are disillusioned with the party but will not vote Labour. Most turn to the Liberals in these moments, but the Greens have given themselves enough credibility to take that vote.
It’s more than a protest vote, but I’m uncertain it will carry through to the general election in the same manner.
Yes, disillusionment with the Tories is widespread and the great irony is that Sunak and his government seem to be totally oblivious to it. But I could never vote Liberal (I did, many years ago!) as they are simply another shade of Green.
One only has to look at the horrors the Greens have imposed on Brighton to see what sort of future they offer.
Given a choice between a rock and hard place, I did not vote at the last GE, but now I can only vote Reform and cross my fingers that it might just do some good.
Agreed wtih your post up to the point where you said you would vote for Reform. Just no.
Steven Targett
4 months ago
I live in a “Tory Shire” and would no more vote Green than eat my own young. Unfortunately it seems a few of my neighbours would do vote Green out of pure nimbyism.
R Wright
4 months ago
The Greens have more faces than Janus.
Matt B
4 months ago
The Green Party has put people off the issues that the party should have been leading and winning on. The conservatives’ failure to see the link between their party name and conservation underlines their own generational incompetence. Green Party tweeds do indeed seem locally tactical. The failure by all parties is a far wider strategic disaster. We’re all paying the bill for it.
Peter B
4 months ago
This is classic protest voting. Used to be Lib Dem, now also Green. That and a residual anti-Brexit effect. Voting Green is a “free hit” right now – when you believe the outcome is already certain, you can vote any way you like without consequences.
Note to author: Nuneaton and Bedworth is not Tory metroland. The Green vote share in the 2019 election for Nuneaton was 2%. Lib Dem was 4%, Labour 32%, Conservative 60%. But it is actually a tradtional Tory/Labour marginal.
Charles Stanhope
4 months ago
It’s a pity Mr Mcllhagga that your Grand Tour didn’t take you to the idyllic village of EAST BERGHOLT. Famous as the home of John Constable it was also the final home of Churchill’s drunken son Randolph, who was known disparagingly as “the beast of Bergholt” by local tradesmen, due to his parsimonious behaviour. Many years ago I recall one local muttering “Apple doesn’t fall far from tree”.
Recently the tranquilly of this sacred space has been destroyed by the construction of two huge housing estates, one to the north and one to the south, thus holding the village in a crab/vice like grip. All this off course after a most vociferous and acrimonious planning battle, that even had the village attempting to an abandon Suffolk and join neighbouring Essex! All to no avail, and all this with a then Tory Council and so called Tory Government! It is the greatest disaster to befall the place since Wolsey failed to complete the Church tower in circa 1530.
However the supposed surge in Green nonsense is surely ephemeral and will disappear if and when some true Tories emerge?
ps. Odd that you made no mention of Ronald Blyth the author of that seminal work on Suffolk, ‘Akenfield’, but perhaps that was before your time. Incidentally Blyth died last year at 100.
Wolsey Church tower development good, local housing bad !
But I take your serious point. Development can and should be done properly. But our beautiful villages were all built by humans, so it clearly isn’t impossible.
I read Akenfield a few months ago. I’d recommend that to anyone. It just seems familiar to me (born in the 60s), but to anyone born later it might have little resonance. But it really does show just how much and how fast rural life has changed in the last 100 years. “Men of Dunwich” about the now submerged Suffolk town is also very good.
PS – and slightly off-topic – I’d quite like to see the Lincoln Cathedral spire put back on. That was once the tallest building in the world.
Yes it was it not over 500’? But a lead covered timber frame rather like its rival Old St Paul’s, so not as impressive as say Strasbourg or Salisbury IMHO.
My choice would be to complete the central tower at Beverley Minster, perhaps the most unknown ‘Cathedral’ sized church in England.
Christopher Posner
4 months ago
You are repeating a common misinterpretation of Burke. By “little platoons” he meant not “local churches, families, charities, and civic associations” but class. See the relevant passage from Reflections on the French Revolution below
“Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.”
“‘They admit to voting Conservative,’ says Patchett, ‘You’d then ask them their views. “We like the environment, we like nature. We believe in all these things as well.” That’s how we are flipping Conservative voters.’”
The Left has always been expert at this stealth undermining of natural opposition by co-opting its language to cover a hidden iceberg of a Progressive agenda. At a time when the British Right seems determined to out-liberal the liberals, it naturally leaves normal conservation minded conservatives with nowhere to go and vulnerable to such bait-and-switch tactics.
If you know your political philosophy you will know that the “conservatives” are supposed to want to conserve things (e.g. the environment) and that Conservatives (i.e. the party) are actually liberals who let the free market destroy what it likes. The modern Conservatives only seek to conserve business interests and a hackneyed kind of racial purity; the rest is free game.
It’s nothing to do with your weird paranoid liberal agenda thing. The “Conservatives” are actually the ones trying to slip in a radical philosophy iceberg.
Alex Lekas
4 months ago
These Greens, as termed here, sound like what used to be called conservatives – people who tend to oppose change for its own sake and favor the tried and true over the trendy. What is wrong exactly with being judicious about the location of a solar farm?
Lest anyone forget, NIMBYism is not confined to one-time Tories in the UK, or people on the right in general. In the US, the reliably progressive folks at Martha’s Vineyard who parroted all of the dogma about diversity and inclusion on cue did a 180 when faced with a small deposit of illegals on their doorstep. Champions of green energy will fight tooth and nail to prevent wind turbines from blocking their vistas. Police defunders are suddenly tough on crime after becoming victims of it.
It’s easy to support policies that one never expects to live by; it’s quite another matter when people are forced to walk their own talk. Maybe this is just another case of moneyed interests protecting parochial interests at the expense of broader society. It wouldn’t be the first time.
UnHerd Reader
4 months ago
Funny how it seems revolutionary that Conservative voters want to vote to conserve things… Are the voters wrong or the party?
Andrew H
4 months ago
“We’re obviously not against solar power. But we are against solar in inappropriate places.” Of course! This just confirms what I’ve long believed: there are few ideologies more conservative than environmentalism. This boils down to nothing more than NIMBYism, in fact they’re BANANAs – build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.
John Riordan
4 months ago
This looks very much like a bunch of NIMBYs who have discovered a more effective protest vote than the LibDems. None of these people can possibly endure the tax, transport and degrowth policies that the Green Party would introduce if they got the chance.
PEOPLE (forerunner of the Ecology Party, and now the present-day Green Party) was founded by (ex)Conservative politicians over fifty years ago, so nothing much changes. The current Green Party dogmatic obsession with “transubstantiation” (in its modern, intersectional context…) is presumably not popular in rural Suffolk? Focusing on medicalised gender reassignment is one way of lowering population levels by sterilisation, I suppose.
They sound like typical green voters – those with enough time and money to adopt fashionable luxury beliefs. They don’t want solar, wind or nuclear – and I assume coal would be even less attractive. In 2024, there is no excuse for not understanding the profound dangers of net zero.
Exactly. They are the posh Wellie wing of our vast narcisstic Property Rich (a class notable in history for having not secured wealth by any merit). All have benefited from the Property Heist since the 90s (rigged Remainiac formula = build no new houses/keep interest rates at zero/stoke demand with mass migration). Bingo! Let them put up their BLM posters and trill and cluck about Greta and Climate change. They are utter idiots drunk on their pompous sense of moral virtue. They avow Neo Pol Potism. They are too scared of seeming raycist to argue against the greatest single force destroying their precious green environment in the UK- the uncontrolled unplanned mass influx of 12 million people. Incredible. I hope these ghastly Greens get eaten by their rewilded wolves and lost in the forest of weeds they prefer to the preservation of our land for the supply of homegrown food.
I agree with you and share your anger. My father thought the same 50 years ago. There are no words good enough to describe the difference between these green slugs and the rest of us fighting for an existence in other parts of the UK.
But, as my father knew, they have contacts, they know people and they have power. This is one of the main reasons why we should never, ever rejoin the EU. The EU is not a democratic organisation and having power, knowing people, being able to influence decisions, etc, will fit nicely into the EU organisation.
You are right to suspect that there may be a push from Starmer to cosy up to the EU again. Independence scares Labour and frankly their blind faith in the EU – along with the equality mania and mad eco Millibandism – represent the only credos in their manky stinky ideas locker. But I think the EU will be a very different beast in 5 years. The crises in their no Russian gas economy & mass immigration/ multiculturalism will have turned Western Europe – maybe even France – Eurosceptic. The far greater danger lies here. Our ruling permanent Progressive New Order and Blob are hardcore diehard Remainiacs. The sickness of the EU credo of governance – a cancerous failing system of top down diktat, suffocating regulation and Blob bureaucracy and contempt for a electoral mandate (er – us) lives on in them, the lawyers, the evangelical BBC, woke academia and the wfh broken public sector. No vote can remove our dodgy immigration judges, the secret EHCR judges abroad, the ‘bullied’ Brex assassinating (lockdown partying) Civil Servants, the Leninist immoral Young Doctors, the useless Bank of England & NHS leaders. We are an EU Legacy Party State. Our problem lies here, not there.
I agree with you here entirely. What I do not believe, however, is that ALL the Greens in Suffock are Nimbys. There is a sensible case to be made for better quality food and food security, but both parties ignore it, because food would cost more – and quickly affect the amount spent on a roof over our heads, which BOTH parties want to avoid. In short the Labour party is just as complicit.
Very creative! I suggest sitting down and having a cup of tea, let the blood pressure drop a bit.
Skewering our selfish eco nut Elect is both creatively satisfying and delivered with relish in a dish served very cold….
Whereas the typical tory voters are those with enough time and money to adopt unfashionable luxury beliefs!
So it’s just a bunch of older wealthy NIMBYs doing everything they can to block much needed infrastructure and housing for the following generations?
Never mind that they largely got a start in life thanks to the government building entire new towns and houses across the country, they’ll do everything in their power to ensure the youngsters today don’t have the same chance at getting ahead that they did
Don’t forget that they squirrelled away all that old industry into their pension portfolios in the privatisation revolution and have retired early off the proceeds (with a little help from QE).
Tell Sid – he could miss a once in a lifetime chance to be a rentseeker.
You can hear them if asked what the economic future will be like under Green’s:
”Yes, Yes, of course all this green developement and ESG, and Nimbyism will stop anyone who is not already set in life from ever getting there – but what is the problem with that? I cannot see the point of your comment.”
I’m sure they’re in favour of allotments, electric car charging points, locally produced meat, and maybe a nice crop of wind turbines on their land. Oh, and the feelings of moral superiority that come with luxury beliefs, of course.
Expect a change of heart when they realise the blokes who fix and deliver their stuff can’t afford to run their white vans, and an African shanty town appears on the village green.
Love that argument. First half is semi-decent though wouldn’t the owners of white vans prefer to serve “luxury” customers with the means to cover the cost and living close by? Then couldn’t think of anything else so reeled out a lazy right wing scaremonger.
I think we can say that climate change has now fully replaced socialism as the West’s secular religion. Climate change, gender liberation and racial justice as one post-Marxist complex.
Talking of which, people with resources, often inherited, still have their white man’s burden and even if they are conservative they can embrace local green concerns rather than the desertification or flooding of poor countries.
Good. This in another part of the destruction of the Tory party which will get its head stamped on later this year.
This is nothing to do with right and left and it’s disappointing that the author hasn’t grasped that despite his grand tour.
Neither is it about wealthy landowners or ‘luxury beliefs’, conservative voters in this area are typical working class people who are disillusioned with the party but will not vote Labour. Most turn to the Liberals in these moments, but the Greens have given themselves enough credibility to take that vote.
It’s more than a protest vote, but I’m uncertain it will carry through to the general election in the same manner.
Yes, disillusionment with the Tories is widespread and the great irony is that Sunak and his government seem to be totally oblivious to it. But I could never vote Liberal (I did, many years ago!) as they are simply another shade of Green.
One only has to look at the horrors the Greens have imposed on Brighton to see what sort of future they offer.
Given a choice between a rock and hard place, I did not vote at the last GE, but now I can only vote Reform and cross my fingers that it might just do some good.
Agreed wtih your post up to the point where you said you would vote for Reform. Just no.
I live in a “Tory Shire” and would no more vote Green than eat my own young. Unfortunately it seems a few of my neighbours would do vote Green out of pure nimbyism.
The Greens have more faces than Janus.
The Green Party has put people off the issues that the party should have been leading and winning on. The conservatives’ failure to see the link between their party name and conservation underlines their own generational incompetence. Green Party tweeds do indeed seem locally tactical. The failure by all parties is a far wider strategic disaster. We’re all paying the bill for it.
This is classic protest voting. Used to be Lib Dem, now also Green. That and a residual anti-Brexit effect. Voting Green is a “free hit” right now – when you believe the outcome is already certain, you can vote any way you like without consequences.
Note to author: Nuneaton and Bedworth is not Tory metroland. The Green vote share in the 2019 election for Nuneaton was 2%. Lib Dem was 4%, Labour 32%, Conservative 60%. But it is actually a tradtional Tory/Labour marginal.
It’s a pity Mr Mcllhagga that your Grand Tour didn’t take you to the idyllic village of EAST BERGHOLT. Famous as the home of John Constable it was also the final home of Churchill’s drunken son Randolph, who was known disparagingly as “the beast of Bergholt” by local tradesmen, due to his parsimonious behaviour. Many years ago I recall one local muttering “Apple doesn’t fall far from tree”.
Recently the tranquilly of this sacred space has been destroyed by the construction of two huge housing estates, one to the north and one to the south, thus holding the village in a crab/vice like grip. All this off course after a most vociferous and acrimonious planning battle, that even had the village attempting to an abandon Suffolk and join neighbouring Essex! All to no avail, and all this with a then Tory Council and so called Tory Government! It is the greatest disaster to befall the place since Wolsey failed to complete the Church tower in circa 1530.
However the supposed surge in Green nonsense is surely ephemeral and will disappear if and when some true Tories emerge?
ps. Odd that you made no mention of Ronald Blyth the author of that seminal work on Suffolk, ‘Akenfield’, but perhaps that was before your time. Incidentally Blyth died last year at 100.
Wolsey Church tower development good, local housing bad !
But I take your serious point. Development can and should be done properly. But our beautiful villages were all built by humans, so it clearly isn’t impossible.
I read Akenfield a few months ago. I’d recommend that to anyone. It just seems familiar to me (born in the 60s), but to anyone born later it might have little resonance. But it really does show just how much and how fast rural life has changed in the last 100 years. “Men of Dunwich” about the now submerged Suffolk town is also very good.
PS – and slightly off-topic – I’d quite like to see the Lincoln Cathedral spire put back on. That was once the tallest building in the world.
Yes it was it not over 500’? But a lead covered timber frame rather like its rival Old St Paul’s, so not as impressive as say Strasbourg or Salisbury IMHO.
My choice would be to complete the central tower at Beverley Minster, perhaps the most unknown ‘Cathedral’ sized church in England.
You are repeating a common misinterpretation of Burke. By “little platoons” he meant not “local churches, families, charities, and civic associations” but class. See the relevant passage from Reflections on the French Revolution below
“Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.”
That’s a little too erudite for UnHerd.
“‘They admit to voting Conservative,’ says Patchett, ‘You’d then ask them their views. “We like the environment, we like nature. We believe in all these things as well.” That’s how we are flipping Conservative voters.’”
The Left has always been expert at this stealth undermining of natural opposition by co-opting its language to cover a hidden iceberg of a Progressive agenda. At a time when the British Right seems determined to out-liberal the liberals, it naturally leaves normal conservation minded conservatives with nowhere to go and vulnerable to such bait-and-switch tactics.
If you know your political philosophy you will know that the “conservatives” are supposed to want to conserve things (e.g. the environment) and that Conservatives (i.e. the party) are actually liberals who let the free market destroy what it likes. The modern Conservatives only seek to conserve business interests and a hackneyed kind of racial purity; the rest is free game.
It’s nothing to do with your weird paranoid liberal agenda thing. The “Conservatives” are actually the ones trying to slip in a radical philosophy iceberg.
These Greens, as termed here, sound like what used to be called conservatives – people who tend to oppose change for its own sake and favor the tried and true over the trendy. What is wrong exactly with being judicious about the location of a solar farm?
Lest anyone forget, NIMBYism is not confined to one-time Tories in the UK, or people on the right in general. In the US, the reliably progressive folks at Martha’s Vineyard who parroted all of the dogma about diversity and inclusion on cue did a 180 when faced with a small deposit of illegals on their doorstep. Champions of green energy will fight tooth and nail to prevent wind turbines from blocking their vistas. Police defunders are suddenly tough on crime after becoming victims of it.
It’s easy to support policies that one never expects to live by; it’s quite another matter when people are forced to walk their own talk. Maybe this is just another case of moneyed interests protecting parochial interests at the expense of broader society. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Funny how it seems revolutionary that Conservative voters want to vote to conserve things… Are the voters wrong or the party?
“We’re obviously not against solar power. But we are against solar in inappropriate places.” Of course! This just confirms what I’ve long believed: there are few ideologies more conservative than environmentalism. This boils down to nothing more than NIMBYism, in fact they’re BANANAs – build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.
This looks very much like a bunch of NIMBYs who have discovered a more effective protest vote than the LibDems. None of these people can possibly endure the tax, transport and degrowth policies that the Green Party would introduce if they got the chance.